Communism

This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.

與講師見面

One of the big effects of World War One, is the rise of modern Communism.

Well, Revolutionary Socialism wasn't a new Idea,

so just think for a moment, as we do

all through this course, to keep asking those why questions.

Why was the First World War so important to the rise of Communism?

Well, in a way, you can kind of summarize it pretty simply.

Point one, the War.

All liberal institutions hadn't prevented that horror.

So if you were against the War, appalled by the War,

that seems to be a devastating indictment of the status quo.

Revolutionary Socialism certainly not the status quo.

The other thing in its favor: chaos.

Remember we talked about all those shattered empires.

What takes their place?

The one thing the revolutionaries often had were

disciplined cells of organized people, ready to act.

That gave them an advantage in a period of Chaos.

Let's take a hard look now at the particular case of the Russian Revolution.

Just a brief recap on Russian politics in the generation prior to the Revolution.

This was a very polarized politics.

Remember the ruling elite is part of what I've called a National

Tradition political movement.

The language of the Russian Court through most of the 1800s had been French.

Towards the end of the 1800s, though, the Russian nobility, the aristocracy,

are all about Russification, anti-Semitism, cultivating

themselves as the embodiment of the nation.

So you have this National Tradition party, really the supreme world example

of a ruling National Tradition party, in the tsar and the Russian aristocracy.

You have the Russian people, but one of the striking

things about the polarized Russian politics is what we referred to, remember

in those lectures about the democratic revolutions, we kept talking about, sort

of the intermediate assemblies, institutions?

In the 1700s, in France, the nobility were in the intermediate institutions.

What's happened now is that Russia has very

weak intermediate institutions. Almost non-existent.

The nobility has aligned itself with the tsar, by and large,

and as part of the ruling national elite.

Yes, after the 1905 Revolution tsars created

a parliament, it's a relatively weak parliament.

So as a result, these institutions are

unusually weak. Lacking a real outlet, intermediary outlet,

even a lot of the Democratic Socialists in Russia had given up on peaceful change

and were devoted to terrorism and violence as the only way of overthrowing the tsar.

That's a little bit of the background you have when you get into the

situation the empire faced as it begins to enter almost a third year of war.

Early 1917. You have

this empire that, because it has such weak

intermediate institutions, also has a relatively weak state apparatus.

It has a decent apparatus for repression.

But just for sheer administrative management? Not great.

So remember, we kept talking about how the First World

War forced states to be more and more like total states?

The Russian Empire

just doesn't have the same kind of apparatus to control all the

resources of the country as efficiently as some of the other countries can,

and as the war keeps going on, the strain of managing all that

begins to break down and a lot of just basic services break down:

support for the widows of war veterans;

problems in getting food supply to the armies; and also keeping other people fed.

Yes, the Russian Empire had tried to make some superficial changes:

So Saint Petersburg, the name of the capital, sounded too

German, so during the war they changed the name to Petrograd.

By the way, then after the war it changed to Leningrad

but today it's back to the historic name Saint Petersburg again.

Bottom line, though, is by early 1917, the strain was becoming too much.

I quoted

you that passage in Landsdowneï¿½s memo in the British Cabinet

in 1916, where it was apparent even to outside observers

that the Russian Empire was under extremely difficult strain and

might not be able to survive a continuation of the war.

It begins to break down.

It begins to break down first with a revolution in early

1917 that, if anything, is more about making the government more

responsive and more effective. In a way, it's a patriotic revolution.

At first, the revolutionaries are really ambivalent

about whether Russia should leave the war.

Some of them are arguing that Russia needs to have

a revolution to be more effective in winning the war.

Take for example this man: Alexander Kerensky.

Kerensky was a Democratic Socialist.

He'd been right on the cusp of the socialist's

who had gone out into violent opposition of

the regime or whether to participate in parliamentary action.

In early 1917, he's seen as a somewhat more

centrist figure, and he becomes the principle leader of the

coalition of groups that take charge after the tsar

abdicates in early 1917, and Russia creates a provisional republic.

The Russian Republic

actually organized elections as one of its first priorities.

These elections were held in late 1917, not everybody voted of course,

but a substantial number of people voted, and the results are interesting.

If you take a look at these results, what you see is the dominant

role, you can see it in the top of the chart up here, or here.

These are basically Democratic Socialist parties.

Now some of the members of these

parties had gone into violent opposition against the

tsar, even supporters of terrorism, but that's because

they believed there were really no peaceful outlets.

It's not useful, necessarily, to think of these people all as orthodox Marxists.

A lot of the socialist revolutionaries were about land reform.

Now the land reformers didn't want to take the land

away from the rich nobles and give it to the state.

They wanted to take land away from the rich nobles and give it to poor peasants.

In other words, they didn't want to eliminate private property.

They wanted to redistribute private property.

Now that made them revolutionary in Russia, but that's a very different

agenda from the agenda of the Bolsheviks over here, who you see

have substantial support, and depending on how you count them and their

allies, think of them as there are no more than about 25 to

30 percent of the people voting in Russia in 1917.

The

weight mainly held by people who wanted radical change, but

were interested in preserving capitalism, basic institutions of private property,

and some sort of apparatus of democratic rule, which they thought Russia needed.

So here's the scene in the fall of 1917.

There's a provisional government. It's just held elections.

We've just talked about the result.

They're still in the war against the Germans, though

the war is not going well and is increasingly unpopular.

They are supporters of land reform but

haven't really started redistributing the land yet,

and there are a lot of confused

arguments and divisions inside the provisional government.

Even though the elections have been held,

the new National Assembly hasn't yet taken office.

That's the environment in which the Bolsheviks launched

the decisive coup, in which they overthrow the provisional government.

That's the coup that occurs in November 1917.

You'll sometimes see this referred to as the October Revolution, that's

because Russia was still on a different calendar, the Gregorian calendar,

and by the Russian calendar, it was in October, but by

the calendar the rest of the world was using, it was in

November 1917. And I keep talking about the Bolsheviks.

Who are the Bolsheviks?

Their leader is this man: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Lenin is kind of an adopted name.

The family name was Ulyanov.

Lenin and his familiy had a long

history of revolutionary activism against the tsar.

He'd been in prison.

He left prison. He'd been in

exile when World War One began in Switzerland.

In 1917, the Germans conducted what we would

now call in intelligence circles a covert action.

The covert action of German intelligence was to

put Lenin, in Switzerland, into a railway car, a

sealed railway car, as if he was a

form of bacteria, and essentially send him into Russia,

inject him into the Russian body politic in the hope that he

would make a lot of mischief and take Russia out of the war.

Lenin had been receiving some subsidies from the German government,

and Lenin proceeded to do exactly what the Germans wanted him to do.

This was not because Lenin was not a patriot. Of course, Lenin's patriotism went beyond any one country. He was an internationalist. He was a true internationalist revolutionary in his orientation. He wanted to overthrow the German government too, when he got to it.

If for the moment the Germans were his instrument for accomplishing the

revolution, he would use the Germans, just as they were using him.

So in 1917, Lenin arrives in Petrograd.

He begins organizing other exiles who

are returning along with revolutionaries in the country.

One of his key right-hand men will be this man: Leon Trotsky.

A skillful organizer.

Jewish.

Deeply committed to the revolutionary cause.

One of the things that distinguishes Bolshevism, and Lenin personally, is

that Bolshevism is not about being a mass movement in this era.

Bolshevism basically says: the masses need to be led by a revolutionary vanguard.

That vanguard needs to be the absolute elite of the movement.

Totally submitting to party discipline,

organizing on military lines into revolutionary

cells because only with the strongest

party discipline can they possibly succeed.

And Lenin himself in his tactical single- mindedness helps to lead the party to a

successful overthrow of the center of power

in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1917.

They tried before.

They tried in July 1917 and almost been broken by it.

And indeed a lot of Lenin's comrades did

not think the time for revolution was right.

This was a very close run thing. But Lenin pulled it off.

Here's a wonderful contemporary portrait by

the Russian painter, Ivan Vladimirov, of

the Red Guards storming the Winter Palace, which is where the provisional government

had set up as its headquarters.

In November 1917, the Pogrom of the

Winter Palace, he called this painting, in which

the Red Guards are poking their bayonets

into the portraits of the ruling aristocracy.

Incidentally, remembering back to those images

of the French Revolution, you'll remember

it when we talked about the democratic revolutions, we talked about how this

became a revolution against the exclusive

control of government by hereditary aristocracy.

Those issues are still very much alive and well in Russia in 1917 and 1918.

So the Bolsheviks take over at the end of 1917.

The Constituent Assembly, that had just been elected in the 1917 elections,

they gather at the beginning of 1918.

The Bolsheviks

kind of listened to them for a few minutes and then essentially send them all home.

Some of the socialist revolutionaries, angry and frustrated at the

Bolshevik's seizure of power, actually

themselves begin launching revolutionary activity.

There are a couple of attempts to kill Lenin himself,

one of which came very close to killing him.

But the bottom line is that in early 1918

and for some time there is no quick counter

to the Bolshevik seizure of power.

There is no obvious organized counter movement

that instantly springs up to fight them.

Eventually there will be many, many sources of opposition to the Bolsheviks.

But the key point about the ensuing Russian

Civil War is they never have a single agenda.

They never have a unitary command. They never act in a coordinated way.

A civil war did begin by late 1918.

Scattered parts of Russia and the Russian elites deeply loyal to the former

tsar, to the nobility, to the old Russian traditions and way of life,

others, including Socialist Revolutionaries who are appalled by the

Bolshevik methods, by their seizure of private property, all rally against them.

Here's a map that gives you a sense of the ensuing civil war.

And you can also see what

a close call this was.

But a key point is that from the very beginning of

the civil war, the Bolsheviks control heartland that looks something like this:

Moscow, Saint Petersburg, then called Petrograd.

And they're never really broken out of that control of the power centers.

Foreign governments obviously took an interest in what was happening

in Russia.

The Bolsheviks were going to take Russia out of the war.

Taking Russia out of the war means that the Allies are

more likely to lose the war, so they care about this.

The Allies then take sides with the Whites, who were

pledged to try to get Russia back in the war.

But think about it, on the Bolshevik side, ending

the war was a key element of their political appeal.

We will stop the war.

But man, the Germans made them pay a high price to stop

the war, a very beneficial treaty for the Germans and their allies.

Therefore from the White perspective, they say the

Reds have sold out their motherland to the Germans.

So the Whites are enveloping themselves in the patriotic appeal.

The Reds are saying, we have to do this so the revolution can survive,

and indeed weï¿½ll eventually spread the revolution

to all these new bourgeois states: Poland

and even Germany and beyond.

The foreign powers land troops to try to help some of the White forces.

The British, for example, land some troops here.

The French land some troops here.

The Japanese and the Americans in the Soviet Far East, in Siberia.

The Americans fairly quickly get tired of this, find it pointless, and withdraw.

The British and French also become disillusioned

with their efforts.

But actually, it's a very close call for the Soviet regime.

The Allies do not intervene in full Strength, and indeed some of their soldiers,

who themselves identify with the working class,

have doubts about what they're doing there.

And the Soviet government survives very narrowly

the uncoordinated attacks of their White enemies.

Probably the most dangerous point was in

late 1919.

White forces led by a man named Yudenich are

pushing them hard right up here, marching almost taking Petrograd.

Around that time forces out of the Far East led

by a man named Admiral Kolchak were marching from here.

It was these pressures that actually caused the Soviets to make things

even more polarized by killing the tsar and all his family, and

making it clear that there was no bridge going back to the Romanov Dynasty.

The Soviets, however, were able to beat them back individually.

They win here.

They win over here.

There's another significant threat from the South, led

by a man named Denikin, they beat that back.

They then launch their own offensive to try and

destroy the new government of Poland, and Bolshevize it.

There's a climactic battle right outside of Warsaw, in which

the Polish government, the new Polish nation, fights

for its survival and wins;

and the treaty settles the border, at least for a while,

between the new state of Poland and the new Soviet state.

Bottom line is the Soviet government survives.

It's a close call, as I say, especially

in 1919, maybe into early 1920, but they survive.

After they survive, there is even a

revolution against the new Soviet government from

revolutionaries who resented the dictatorship being imposed

by the Bolsheviks, led by sailors in Kronstadt.

It's ruthlessly put down

by the Red Army. Thousands of people are killed.

And finally things begin to stabilize after enormous loss of life and

destruction of property through the length and breadth of the Russian Empire.

It settles, begins to settle down by about 1921 into 1922.

But it's not settling down everywhere else in Europe,

because the Bolshevik example is contagious.

There are revolutions in Hungary, Germany, unrest in Poland, which I've

just described, the revolution, even again, in the Soviet Union, in Kronstadt.

In the Bavarian portion of Germany,

centered in Munich, the Communists seize power.

They declare a short lived Bavarian Socialist Republic before it is put down.

In Hungary, the entire state is taken over by communist government,

which rules for a short period of time, until that

communist government is also destroyed by a fierce anti-communist reaction.

Fifth point, let's just close for the moment.

By the beginning of the 1920s, communism had established itself

as a powerful, transnational, mobilizing force of revolutionary

ideology, that has seized control of one of the largest countries on Earth,